Wednesday, January 27, 2010

A Spicy Kale Soup Recipe from a Centenarian Azorean

A bookseller colleague sent me an heirloom recipe many moons ago when we were chatting about our mutual love of cooking. She has a neighbor, a certain Mrs. Lewis, a native of the Azores, who was 102 years old and still cooking up wonderful things in her kitchen at the time my buddy sent on her recipe for Kale Soup. I like to think Mrs. Lewis is now 103 and still stirring up pots of this wonderful soup, which is a traditional favorite in Portugal and the Azores, an Atlantic chain of islands 900 miles west of Lisbon and a Portuguese Autonomous Region.

My hardy kale plants soldier on in the Crispy garden even under the snow and after enduring several bouts of freezing and thawing along the temperature scale. Kale is a super vegetable in terms of nutrition too. Kale is high in many great vitamins and nutrients, including betacarotene, Vitamins C and K, lutein and calcium, and it makes a hearty soup for these chilly days of deep winter in upstate New York.

I am reproducing this treasure of a recipe below verbatim, (**funny typos and all, you'll see) and will just note that in deference to my Crispy spouse, Dan, who eschews meat, I substituted 1 (12 oz.) package of Melissa's meatless soy chorizo, removed from its inedible casing, for the linguica sausage called for by Mrs. Lewis.

Bring water, onion, garlic, salt and linguica to boil. Add greens and potato, cook until tender. Serve with bread. If you don't have linguica you can use salt pork and if you don't have meat use red beans.

I am happy to report that I the host of WHB #218 this week and will be happy to accept recipes featuring plant ingredients (herbs, vegetables, fruits, seeds, stems, flowers, etc.) until Sunday, Jan. 31, 2010. Entries must be submitted by:

Your post can be informative, spotlight a particular ingredient and/or include a recipe where your chosen ingredient is one of the primary ingredients in the recipe. WHB posts must be written specifically for this blog event and may not be cross-posted in other events.

If you have a great veggie recipe to share this week, please send your posts to oldsaratogabooks AT gmail DOT com with WHB#218 in the subject line and the following details:

7 comments:

Oh, Rachel, this sounds wonderful. In fact, it sounds like the caldo gallego I used to get in a favorite Spanish restaurant on 14th Street. I had no idea kale was so hearty. If I can get my act together, I have a great veggie recipe to submit.

Wow, Rachel, your kale is amazing! I have a few plants that are still going strong from last summer, while the ones I planted at the beginning of winter are not doing well: I think they got freezing temperatures when they were too young. Kale is such a versatile vegetable and so good for us. I'll do my best to participate. I am hosting pretty soon myself.

Arlene and Simona, I'd love to have you submit a recipe this week for WHB. And I am really amazed at how the kale has stood up. I have a pretty windy location with corn and hay fields all around that are bare in the winter, so the wind really whips through. But these kale plants keep feeding us!

Foodycat: That's actually my husband's cousin with the impressive pike. He fished it up out of an icehole in a lake in the Adirondacks and was pretty proud when it came up.

Joanne: Soyrizo is good. I thought it might be a link I could fry up, but I imagine that would have be an animal product casing, so since this is also a vegan product, I had to squeeze it out of a paper casing and it disintegrated throughout my soup. Aside from the surprise of not having soy chorizo chunks, it really was a tasty product.

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This blog is an original work of creative expression by Rachel Jagareski. All photos, text, and original recipes herein are copyrighted by the author/artist Rachel Jagareski (c) 2007-2014. All rights are reserved by the author. Please contact me for permission to republish or broadcast any material beyond your own personal use. Thank you.